Well, I’ve just finished madly sorting out my Year 10 reports and they’re now in the library being bound, ready for posting. The year 10s start two weeks of work experience after next week, but due to various things happening next week I’ve just finished my final year 10 classes of this school year.

In fact, next week I only have Monday as a proper, normal day. On Tuesday the first two periods are being used for careers talks. On Wednesday I am at an NQT conference all day, Thursday is the year 10 parents day and Friday is an INSET day.

This is very good

They’re done, no more until next year. Thank fuck.

That is all.

I have spent a rather chilled out day completing most of my form’s reports. It’s suitably tedious and I managed to put it off until about 2pm. My house is now very clean and tidy as a result and I have created a fantastic Excel spreadsheet and Word template so I can mail-merge the comments easily.

Guess I’d best get on with writing the comments then.

When at Uni training to be a teacher we were introduced to the concept known as “work life balance”. The idea being you leave your work at work, and don’t bring it home, the intention being to stop us going crazy.

Yeah, work life balance meet the real world.

What they should be teaching new teachers is not how to manage their work and life, but how to adlib on the spot and make stuff up as they go along. Little coping mechanisms for when It All Goes Wrong, or when someone springs a surprise.

Like tomorrow. I have an all day ICT Booster day where me and another teacher are taking 15 year 9 students and doing a full day of ICT with them. Fine, should be OK if the kids don’t turn into idiots. Only I forgot to set some cover work for the lesson I should normally be teaching on Thursday morning.

If this was my training year I’d now be sat up till 10pm planning a lesson, making resources and generally having a bit of a controlled panic. Instead I’m writing this. Tomorrow I will go into work and pick out a random cover lesson from our pile, print off the worksheets (after modiftying them a bit) and leave them in the classroom. Job done.

They can make me a poster about Internet Safety. That’ll do. The non IT trained cover teacher can then just wander about trying to persuade the kids to keep off the Internet.

Oh, supposedly I have to write some year 12 reports for kids I taught six months ago. Right… OK… well I’ll do that in between my year 10 reports, planning next week’s lessons and preparing for my NQT final interview on Friday. Or I won’t. If they want reports they can ask for them.

Managing workload is easy - do the important stuff and leave the rest until someone asks for it. If it’s not important they’ll not ask again. And do the ten minute quick stuff immediately. Think of it as the Getting Things Done philosophy combined with the Dilbert mentality.

Monthly curry meeting tomorrow

Help me! I’m drowning in Year 10 reports. I have my entire form’s reports to collate, sort, read and comment on. It’s a paper shuffling nightmare of biblical proportions. I’m half way through reading them and making notes, and already I want to burn the lot. It’s not helped by finding mistakes and having to ask for some to be reprinted… and conversely having the same requests made of me from other year 10 tutors.

English teachers are the worse, they pick out random grammatical errors but rather than explain how to fix it, simply circle the offending word and leave you to guess what’s wrong. I’ll start circling random IT layout errors then - oh that circle? well you started in Times New Roman size 12, but then this line is in size 11, and this paragraph is 2 pixels to the right compared to the rest. Also, pressing space loads of times to line things up is poor, go away and learn about tables. This report is hand written… please get with the 1990s and use a word processor.

And we’re done. They’ve been written and copied to my laptop. Now to read them, check for mistakes, print them, sign them all (and their copies) and cut them up.

After the 5th report my signature turns into a meaningless squigggle.

Oh the tedium! 91 reports to write and I’m about half way through. Thank god for Excel and Word’s mail-merge. Having to actually type out 91 kids names from a list would be awful. It’s bad enough having to write their comments.

Reports aren’t a substitution for parents’ evenings. Although it is satisfying being able to explain exactly why someone’s child isn’t reaching their full potential.

When these are done, it’s the Year 10 ones. Whooo.